Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud computing has been named as one of 12 disruptive technologies which will change the relationship between the CIO and the boardroom, according to a report by Advanced 365. The evolving role of the CIO, and the C-suite in general, has long been a feature of modern business. Opinions differ, whether it’s a wag who proclaims CIO to mean ‘career is over’, or whether it’s a report which advocates more fluency and fluidity between executives.

The Advanced 365 paper takes a look at the different types of CIO today and how it fits in to various businesses:

• CIO as manager: A CIO who delivers today, may not be as much of an ideas person but manages the business for commercial success
• CIO as leader: Engaging in and delivering change throughout the organisation, planning for tomorrow and designing new positions within the company
• CIO as entrepreneur: Dreams about the future, seeks out change and innovates against those changes to improve commercially…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Trevor Pott.

Sysadmin Blog Docker is slowly taking over the world. From its humble origins, which we explored on Friday, as an internal project at dotCloud, through to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will support Docker natively in Windows, Docker looks set to become a major component of modern IT infrastructure.

Today, Docker is powered by Libcontainer, rather than the more widespread LXC. The switch has some very real implications for the future of Docker, for its potential adoption and for its interaction with the community. Libcontainer matters for the same reason that Android matters: control. Consider for a moment that while there are eleventy squillion distributions of Linux out there, almost nobody says "Android Linux."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Srikanth RP.

Though cloud adoption continues to be on the rise, there are still a host of mid-sized companies for whom cloud computing is still a complex topic. Cloudstrats, a startup, aims to do just that by simplifying the adoption of technologies like cloud for organizations. “In today’s world, only large organizations have access to high-end technology solutions.

Most of the industry best practice solutions are not cost effective for others to explore. SMEs and sectors like education intend to leverage IT best practices for their businesses but are inhibited by the costs and unavailability of the right partner to support them. Cloudstrats was founded with the vision to Make IT Simple for all our customers. We intend to accelerate the adoption of latest technologies by enhancing their accessibility for every company in the market,” explains Piyus Kanti, CEO, Cloudstrats. Kanti says that the firm’s aim is to use IT as a success factor for business, instead of being a bottleneck…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Kip Tom, a seventh-generation family farmer, harvests the staples of modern agriculture: seed corn, feed corn, soybeans and data. “I’m hooked on a drug of information and productivity,” he said, sitting in an office filled with computer screens and a whiteboard covered with schematics and plans for his farm’s computer network.

Mr. Tom, 59, is as much a chief technology officer as he is a farmer. Where his great-great-grandfather hitched a mule, “we’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones,” he said. The demise of the small family farm has been a long time coming…

Grazed from ITNews.  Author: Brett Winterford.

Mi9 has dramatically improved the speed at which it can deliver new websites, apps and features and additionally halved its data centre footprint via an aggressive adoption of public cloud and a restructure of its IT operations around the concept of DevOps.

The media company, formerly known as Ninemsn, is wholly owned by Channel Nine after Microsoft divested its share in the company in late 2013.  Under the new ownership structure, the company can now open up about its plans to go ‘all-in’ on public cloud – and not, as previously anticipated, with Microsoft…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeff Burt.
 
Cisco Systems officials have spent much of the year talking about extending the cloud with "the fog."  In January, the networking giant introduced its fog computing vision, the idea of bringing cloud computing capabilities—from applications and data analytics to processing, networking and storage—to the edge of the network, closer to the rapidly growing number of end-user devices that are consuming cloud services and generating the increasingly massive amount of data.

Cisco officials also unveiled the company’s IOx platform, designed to bring distributed computing to the network edge.
Earlier this month, the vendor rolled out the next phase of IOx, which included adding to the list of Cisco products that support the platform and the list of partners involved…

Grazed from ScientificAmerican.  Author: Melissa C. Lott.

A German company wants to turn server farms into “distributed cloud heaters.” By spreading computing power across a number of buildings, the company believes that it can provide reliable computing services while increasing the energy efficiency of these notoriously wasteful centers.

Server farms currently use about 30 billion Watts of electricity each year around the globe – the equivalent of about 30 nuclear power plants worth of energy. As global demand for websites, e-mail, and Internet commerce continues to grow, this number is rising more quickly than any other part of the building sector. To make matters worse, computing hubs are notorious for their low energy efficiency, frequently wasting 80-90% of the electricity that they take from the power grids…

Grazed from TheConversation.  Author: David Glance.

The Parliament of the European Union last week voted to call on member states and the European Commission to investigate the operation of search engines in Europe to ensure “a balanced, fair and open internet search structure”.

Although the official text of the resolution doesn’t mention Google specifically by name, the message was clearly aimed at the company that claims 93% of the European search market. The Parliament called on the EC to “consider proposals aimed at unbundling search engines from other commercial services”…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

As mentioned in previous posts, certifications and accreditations are huge pluses for careers. They offer highly focused, lower-cost alternatives to formal continuing education from universities and colleges, and help resumes stand out. Plus, surveys show credentialed professionals often draw higher incomes than their non-credentialed counterparts. For managers and professionals in the fast-changing digital and tech economy, certifications may be the only way to keep skills current and relevant.

That’s why it’s interesting to see there have been efforts underway to organize and offer certifications in the emerging field of cloud computing. The programs now offered cover a range of roles — from developers to administrators to architects to security specialists…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Aurthur Cole.

I’ve pointed out many times over the years that everyone has their own perception of green. To a coal plant operator, a 20 percent reduction in emissions is cause for celebration, while the environmentalist still frets over the 80 percent still coming out of the stack.

So it is understandable that the data center industry – arguably the top energy consumer on the planet – is both the hero and the villain when it comes to greening up the world’s digital infrastructure. And in time-honored tradition, the biggest targets are always first on the hit list, which in this case would be the hyperscale providers like Google, Facebook and Amazon…